Three Flights From Alto Nido

We Say...

Review by Tolu Onafowokan

I first heard Greg Laswell a little over a year ago, while watching one of my guilty pleasures. His piano-driven cover of Cyndi Lauper's "Girls Just Wanna Have Fun," served as the background music to that season's finale of The Hills and provided a perfect soundtrack to whatever was going on at the moment that caused a perfectly-timed mascara-stained tear roll down LC's cheek. It appears that between now and then Laswell has found the time to tap into a few more of my guilty pleasures (namely: strings, tiny bells, tambourines, and brooding male vocals) and include them in his latest release.

In Three Flights From Alto Nado, Laswell successfully plays the role of spurned lover ("And how my love it spins me round, and how my love it's let me down"), optimist ("And I think I like how the day sounds through this new song"), and hesitantly confident independent man ("Don't clutter your head I'm fine strange it's almost been a year"). He masters the slow instrumental build. He lets his voice waver somewhere in the lower, deeper ranges, and brings it back up to let his voice crack, just so a la Chris Martin. He harmonizes gloriously with faceless female accompanists who occasionally appear. He even includes a GarageBand demo of "That It Moves," somehow knowing that yes, you, the listener, also sit in front your Mac and record music and can therefore relate to this. Greg Laswell takes everything we're ashamed to both do and appreciate, packages them into an album, and makes it all work, to glorious effect.